Orbis Terrae Wiki
Hello! So ... I'm pretty new to this wikia thing. I'm going to keep things informal while I find my footing. If you're stumbling across this now, please keep in mind that it is very much a work in progress in its initial stages. I'm not going to bother with typical wiki formatting until after I've jotted down some ideas. Ground rules. Orbis Terrae is an alternate history Earth (or a collection of alternate Earths) designed to serve as a collaborative world in which to build stories. I (Murmurer) am planning on retaining full creative and editorial control, at least for the time being, but I'm open to any suggestions. Go ahead and make any changes you want, but please don't take it personally if I revert them. A particularly welcome form of input would be to let me know if there are any stories out there with similar concepts to this one. I'm not as well-read as I'd like to be, and the central idea (which I'm getting to) seems kinda obvious, so I'd actually be surprised if it hasn't been done before. That central idea: build a 50-50 fantasy/sci-fi hybrid. It would present as fantasy to begin with, but its premise would force both to collide, hopefully producing interesting results. As an alternate history earth, Orbis Terrae diverges from our history somewhere in the middle ages. The significant, overriding difference between our world and theirs is that in Orbis Terrae, magic is real. Magic! So, how is magic compatible with sci-fi? Here's where things get a bit hard to explain. I'll leave the more in-depth reasoning for other pages: Mechanics of Alternate Realities, Magic, and Science. In short, magic can be said to exist through the idiosyncracies of individual perceptions, broadly speaking, via illusion. On modern-day Earth, magic has been forced mostly to the margins of developed civilizations, taking a back-seat to the rigors of theories confirmed by repeated observation and consensus, aka science. In the past, magic existed mainly as a consequence of ignorance about the natural world. But anyway, that's pretty boring. Let's say for the purposes of this story that magic is a real phenomenon, but only for individuals or small groups of people. Science, after all, can only exist through the consensus of many individual points of view. What if reality itself is defined by such a consensus, or by the need for consensus created by billions of co-existing individuals communicating via increasingly faster and more wide-spread means? Huh!? Part of the fun will be in allowing scientists from our world to visit a fantasy-driven feudalistic alternate reality complete with castles, wizards, witches, and dragons. (Not to mention elves, dwarves, trolls, werewolves, vampires, sentient trees, and anything else you can think of.) They'll pose as commoners, take specimens, and conduct experiments, only to find that the observed phenomena are stubbornly difficult to quantify, just like in our world. Imagine someone taking a video camera into a fantasy realm. They capture the footage and bring it back to Earth, only to find that given modern computer graphics, it's extremely hard to convice anyone that it wasn't faked. See Plot Ideas for more. Latest activity Category:Browse